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GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

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Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#161
post #86

Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time, memory, and battery usage. I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.

The market has spoken. No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?

They have. Growth is not through the WWW. Instead, it's through phone apps.

The news experience through websites is so bad that I don't read news on the WWW anymore.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#162
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.

I good compromise is uMatrix, which by default only allows first-party JavaScript and cookies and makes it easy to quickly enable JavaScript/XDR/cookies when necessary using a point and click matrix: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

Isn't uMatrix fully included in uBlock if you simply enable Advanced Mode?

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#163
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>implying Congress will do anything other than continue to line the pockets of rich cronies The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money. However, it may be worth the effort on the state level.

> The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money If everyone who says that voted in the primaries and mid-term elections it wouldn’t be true. The party of dysfunction is in charge now but only because so many people choose not to vote.

In their defense, last vote was on a working day and not all employers let their employees skip work to vote.

It's weird that voting does not take place on a non-working day in the US (like Sunday, for example).

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on the internet. Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see themselves differently. N…

It comes down to one thing: Money. The older internet was not a network of for-profit users trying to rent-seek on every digital interface & every page view. Standards were created by academics, internet committees, and concerned & involved users, trying to figure out what would work best as a resilient distributed system. Now what goes on online is defined by the rent-seekers, the data pimps, and the predators. Thei…

There's a really good piece [1] by David Chapman on how subcultures grow, from creators to fanatics to mops to sociopaths, which ultimately results in their death. Your comment made me realize that the Web is currently well in the "sociopath" phase. I wonder whether any of his suggested remedies can be applied to save the Web from death.

[1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market has spoken. No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?

A properly working market requires informed decisions. Internet privacy invasions are not something that people are well-informed about at a practical level. So GDPR is actually helping to restore the market.

Sure, but people are saying that it makes the UX really obviously terrible too.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#167
post #145

How do you think free sites pay for producing all that valuable content? I find it astonishing that most people seem to think having access to news for free is almost a right. If you had taken their paid subscriptions they'd have served you a less add riddled version.

Ads are perfectly capable of being served without javascript and without cookies and without tracking users across the internet. Serving ads requires exactly: 1) The HTML tag. 2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src="" attribute of the tags. 3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an image. That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the inter…

For that matter "untargeted" in this case just means "not targeted using unrelated viewer data." There's a significant amount of targeting that can take place by targeting based on the content and site. If anything, I would argue that the obsessive ad-network, viewer-based targeting online often has tremendous targeting failures as compared to traditional content-based targeting.

I started distinctly noticing this over the last year or two in thinking about how much more relevant I found advertisements in print magazines and journals as online. In literary journals, I'll find advertisements from publishers about their new releases in related topics. In scientific journals, I'll find conferences, new lab equipment and products for related fields, and so on. In design journals, I'll find advertisements for furniture, fabric, and so on. I get one local art magazine mostly for the advertisements, which are primarily new exhibition announcements. I actually somewhat enjoy seeing these sorts of advertisements: they're clearly marked as ads, but they're also actually useful. If, say, New England Biosciences puts out a kit with new features, their advertising in Science can let me know about an option I might otherwise not have heard about, for example.

Yet even before I started very strongly blocking as many ads and tracking online as possible, the targeting was horrible by comparison. There were the saturation-advertising systems, which would come up with wonderful decisions like "this person just bought a new mattress; that must mean they buy mattresses often, so let's show those advertisements" or "this word was used somewhere in the website, let's show stuff tangentially related to that word," or "everyone is interested in ONE WEIRD TRICK." Most of the time, these advertisements had nothing to do with me, or what I was reading, and they were obnoxious and unhelpful. How this became the norm online, just because on some rare occasions, the algorithms might work well, as opposed to the very well-targeted advertisements in print publications, is quite confusing.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#168
post #160
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you need to explain how China's great firewall (I assume this is what you referenced) is the same as the GDPR? One prevents people in China from accessing stuff the government doesn't like, the other prevents companies from treating your data like shit. > Your world on the internet looks different based on citizenship Yes, my world on the Internet looks a hell of a lot better than the Internet as seen fro…

If you follow the money, they are similar. Both make it harder for the incumbent, US based monopolies to compete with home-grown services. Also, they both massively break the “end-to-end” principle, since your geographic location (and therefore ISP) has a big impact on what data gets served. (The differences between the two are arguably more important, but they are obvious, and have been discussed to death, so I won’…

How is it harder for a US based company to comply with GDPR than a EU based company?

There is no breakage of the end-to-end principle either. EU can only legislate in their own region, so they can't enforce GDPR outside of EU. A company thqt is GDPR compliant for every user doesn't have to check the IP at all. Any differences stem only from the companies will to keep abusing users data in the rest of the world.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#169

So we've recently heard in the news that cryptocurrency mining supposedly takes .5% of all global power. Now compare that to the extra electricity required for everybody undergoing the horrible experience of 80 poorly written trackers and ads constantly overloading each tab in a web browser. This reminds me of the American budget. Cut the funding for Planned Parenthood and the Arts but we need a hundred new tanks!

It’s similar to tons of paper wasted for flyers no one asked for. The people spamming this stuff are never really held accountable for their environmental footprint.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A properly working market requires informed decisions. Internet privacy invasions are not something that people are well-informed about at a practical level. So GDPR is actually helping to restore the market.

Sure, but people are saying that it makes the UX really obviously terrible too.

I agree, but the providers are financially incentivized to make the UX worse via all this stuff, which reduces the number of providers offering a non-terribled UX.

In becoming ad revenue maximizers, taking for-granted assumptions on audience, this situation doesn't optimize for serving the audience well. And since their models are to provide content in bulk, it keeps users served "well enough" to keep coming back, as opposed to less-funded alternatives which might provide a better UX, but don't provide the bulk content that monied sites can.

Fundamentally, people visit sites and endure bad UX if the content is there to draw them. The utility cost of bad UX often isn't the dominating factor.

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